Post Modern NRO

On March 7 Victor Davis Hanson penned a remarkably astute article for National Review Online. He began it with a hilarious series of questions that satirized the attitudes of the press. One example:

CBS: Mr. Secretary! Mr. Secretary! Aren't you worried about reports that Apache helicopters unnecessarily strafed hundreds of retreating Republican Guard battalions that were in essence trying to surrender?
And the follow up, sir: Isn't it true that literally thousands of Republican Guard regiments were allowed to flee unmolested into Syria — and now amount to a potentially dangerous counterrevolutionary force right on the border of a liberated Iraq?

After more in the same vein he he asked the money question

Why will we soon hear such irrational, contradictory questioning — a sort of fantasy circus where Will Kane takes passive-aggressive inquiries from Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer?

His conclusion, our press had become so completely post-modern that its rhetoric had lost all connection to reality.

I think he was on to something. I also think that NRO should have looked in the mirror when they ran it because they have begun to exhibit symptoms of that post-modern attitude.

In a recent outing, Michael Ledeen pats himself on the back for his prescience about the "terror masters" and then offers us this gem.

Since we had taken too long to move on from Afghanistan to challenge the regimes of the terror masters, they had forged an alliance and would cooperate in sending terror squads against our armed forces, with the intention of repeating the Lebanese scenarios in the mid-Eighties (against the United States) and the late Nineties (against Israel).

Fair enough, but NRO ran this only a few days after they ran Stanley Kurtz's piece which evaluated the war effort and concluded

But the fact of the matter is, we went into battle with too few troops.

Now it is hard to reconcile these two points. If we wanted more troops, we would have had to move even more slowly that Mr. Ledeen wanted. If we were to move on the Ledeen schedule, then we would have had even fewer boots on the ground than Kurtz thinks we needed.

Ledeen believes that Syria and Iran are now hostile and will act on that hostility

Just as I have been saying for these many frustrating months, we would find ourselves in a regional conflict, whatever we wanted, and whatever fanciful ideas the likes of Armitage and policy-planning chief Richard Haass conjured up for their personal satisfaction.

But that is hard to reconcile with the Ledeen Doctrine as enunciated by Jonah Goldberg as a justification for the Iraq War over one year ago

I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way).
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Fighting and winning today means not having to fight at all tomorrow —

The point of such a display of force against Iraq is to cow and deter other odious little regimes like Syria. If it is not going to work (as the doctrine's author now hints), then that's a pretty big mea culpa.

Finally, Ledeen offers this optimistic scenario

So they are coming to kill us, which means that there is no more time for diplomatic “solutions.” We will have to deal with the terror masters, here and now. Iran, at least, offers us the possibility of a memorable victory, because the Iranian people openly loath the regime, and will enthusiastically combat it, if only the United States supports them in their just struggle. One may legitimately ask if the Iraqi people are fully prepared for the burdens of democracy after the mind-numbing years of Saddam (I think they are, mind you, but the question is fair), but there is no doubt that the Iranians are up to it.

It may be rude to point out, but the last time Ledeen was so certain about internal affairs in Iran, he nearly sank the Reagan administration. (He's the guy who was pushing for an opening to Iran and was one of the first to start down the path known as Iran-Contra.) Which is something NRO could have him discuss sometime, but i doubt they will.